My first car was a 1978 Datsun B210 sedan that I bought when I was in graduate school. It was a very simple vehicle with nothing fancy on it. But it did have a few, um, quirks. I bought it in the bitterly cold winter of 1983 and promptly spun it in a 360 degree circle in an intersection in Loveland, Colorado late at night after visiting with my then-fiance (and now wife) Deb. Almost all of my interesting car stories come from that car, whom we had dubbed "Elliot."

I was having lunch at the recent LinuxCon and Plumbers conference with a colleague, bragging as usual about how much I love my home near Portland, Oregon. He was having none of it - he feels like Boulder, Colorado where he lives is superior and he was frankly being belligerent about it. (Imagine that, and he even worked for me for a while!) I suppose there are some things to like about Boulder, but I trudged through hip-deep snow there just last winter. In Portland, people claims it rains all the time, but this summer keeps going on and on.

The Yocto Project now provides two new layers related to In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI): meta-ivi and meta-systemd. These layers are contributed and maintained by Wind River Automotive Solutions, as part of Wind River's GENIVI Baseline Integration Team (BIT) contribution. The new layers will be maintained in coordination with the releases of metadata layer combinations.

The Yocto Project is proud to present a compliance program. This program enables individuals or organizations to register as Yocto Project Participants, or to register related projects or products as Yocto Project Compatible. Approved registrants receive special badges as well as guidelines for using the Yocto Project brand.

When I initially started talking publicly about the fact that I was working on the Yocto Project, one of the first questions I got was, in essence, "Why would you need to build an OS from sources?" After all, there are plenty of distros out there who have done the hard work for you.

I remember attending a conference in Taiwan one time and managed to squeeze some time in for an early morning run. Taipei is an amazing, modern city with awesome mass transit, bakeries and restaurants and very friendly people. What I found amazing though was to run down a random urban lane and suddenly see an ancient-looking temple jammed between high-rise buildings. It's one of the charming things about exploring a new place at street level.

One of my favorite funny cube posters was one a friend of mine had in his cube at a prior job. "Documentation? They call it code for a reason." I will admit that I once had a certain amount of programmer chauvanism when it came to documentation. Other than API docs, I had always found "grep" to be much more useful when it came to finding out what I wanted to know.

In part, this attitude was enforced by the state of documentation throughout the software world. Why bother reading documentation if what you want isn't there? Why isn't the documentation better?

For years people talk about eating your own dog food and using the environment you build to actually do the build, well we went and did just that with the Yocto Project Build Appliance. We have created an image which after some tuning and tweaking can start up the Hob tool running on a Poky-based system.

It a full system that includes the downloads directory so that it could be installed behind a corporate firewall, but has the capability to set proxies to get additional source packages.

The latest Yocto Project release hits the streets today: Yocto Project 1.2. This is the project's standard biannual release, and it includes many bug fixes and features. The new features are described in the release notes, but there are a few important ones to note: